THE

LIBERTARIAN

ENTERPRISE

Letters To The Editor

I have been reading your fiction, and your Lever Action essays and
articles in The Libertarian Enterprise for some time now, and I have
found them to be both entertaining and informative. I recently had
chance to read The Probability Broach, and it was excellent. I
haven't had a chance yet to read The Mitzvah, but it's
something I'm looking forward to doing. Keep up the good work.

Aside from your staunch and much appreciated support for the Second
Amendment, I have been particularly interested in your concept of
Bill of Rights enforcement, and have devoted much thought as to how
it could be put into effect. Considering the apparent lack of
interest and occasional (and appalling) resistance the idea has met
with in some circles, I believe I have an idea to get things started
in a big way, and get the public used to the idea of locking up
corrupt politicians through their own efforts. It also should have a
noticeable impact on the problem of police and political corruption
in general. It is something which I feel will delight lovers of
freedom everywhere and leave tyrants and their lackeys beeping and
squeaking with outrage and horror.

I had the idea about a year ago, from bits and pieces which came
together from various sources and observations. I wanted to do
something that would be effective in having a chilling effect on the
over reaching of power and corruption in public office, but that
would be a positive, do it yourself method, much as John Walsh, the
head of America's Most Wanted, did after his son Adam was
murdered. Another source was when I heard about the civil suit Randy
Weaver won in the Ruby Ridge case, and the third was from a
psychological warfare operation conducted during the Korean War.

When I heard about the $3 million dollar settlement Randy Weaver and
his three daughters received when the Feds "paid the vergeld" in that
case, the thought occurred to me that if they had killed one of my
relatives and then tried to, in essence, buy their way out of
punishment, I would have taken the money and turned in against them,
by offering much if not all of it as a standing cash reward for any
information leading to the arrest and conviction of those
responsible.

The third part was from a psyop conducted during the Korean War known
as Operation Moolah. This was a program offering political asylum and
$150,000 cash to any MiG-15 pilot who defected and brought his
fighter with him. This highly successful program not only let us get
a close up look at Russia's newest jet fighter, it had the effect of
making the commissars very nervous about whom they handed the keys to
a shiny new MiG to, from fear that even the most trusted cadre might
"vote with his throttle" for a new life in the decadent west. (For an
overview of this program, you can read Chuck Yeager's autobiography,
as he was the test pilot who flew the newly acquired MiG.) I recall
Soldier Of Fortune magazine doing the same thing during the
Nicaraguan war with a similar offer of a million in gold for any
Sandinista Hind helicopter pilot who defected. Even though no one
took the offer, it had a chilling effect on the Sandinista's use of
their Hinds near border areas.

Therefore, I hit upon the idea of setting up a tax free foundation,
perhaps even a number of them, which we can call it the "Just Rewards
Foundation" for now, which would take public donations and offer it
up as standing cash rewards for any information leading to the arrest
and conviction of any elected or appointed official on any felony.

This idea takes advantage of the most prominent fact about corrupt
cops and politicians, which is that they are corrupt. Based on the
notion there's no honor among thieves, it strikes at the main thing
that holds the "Blue Wall of Silence" and its political counterpart
together by making them afraid to trust one another. The idea is to
create a major chilling effect on the activities of corrupt officials
by creating a situation where they cannot trust anyone around them to
enlist them in any kind of criminal scheme for fear their partner, or
one of their aides, or staffers, or secretaries, or even their wife
or kids, are spying on them to turn them in, or that maybe the person
approaching them is merely setting them up for the reward.

The trick to making this work is two-pronged: first, to ensure the
total anonymity of the informants, so they will feel safe from
reprisal; and second, to place such huge rewards on their heads they
will be tempted to turn themselves in for the reward. In fact,we
could offer a 20% bonus if they do. The rewards will also serve to
give financial support to genuine whistle blowers, who are often
subject to considerable financial hardships by the system for their
actions, and who often never regain what they had prior to standing
up for what's right.

On the first point, it would be necessary to work out a system using
attorneys as intermediaries (where one attorney is hired to hire
another attorney, and that one perhaps another one, so their client's
identity would be privileged information), and to set up a website
where tipsters could get the information on how to do this
anonymously, for example by logging on from the public library. (We
can also include on the website a list of things it's illegal for
government officials to do; I recall reading a piece by Charles
Curley on joke laws that were never enforced that listed such very
interesting things it's unlawful for Congressmen to do, things they
probably do every day. We can call it "Things You Never Knew It Was
Illegal For Your Congressman To Do But No One Ever Told About Before"
or some such; it'll give people an idea of things to watch out for,
and into this we can work a listing of things that will provide for
Bill of Rights enforcement.) The payment of rewards should probably
be done through offshore numbered accounts; in fact, I would suggest
that all funds be handled by a legally separate foundation overseas,
with the domestic foundation acting merely as an information clearing
house which collects the information and passes it on to the
authorities, and gives the okay for payments of rewards.

Now, since the public officials most likely to object to this are, by
definition, criminals, and ones with access to all the methods and
resources of police espionage at their disposal and a cloak of law at
that (as once it begins to be effective, they will go after the group
well before they themselves have been fingered by it), it will be
necessary for the foundation to take stringent security measures.
Given that the IRS and other agencies will be used to target the
foundation for "investigation" so they can snoop through all its
records, placing the money part of the operation overseas will help
shield it from their reach. The most obvious counter-intelligence
methods that come to mind is that they will attempt to place
confidential informants and agents provocateur among the foundation's
staff, both for gathering information and to attempt to discredit the
foundation by causing someone to be falsely convicted or by causing
the mishandling of donations.

This can be minimized by, first, careful selection of the persons who
will initially head the operation. After the first chosen few are
recruited to start the ball rolling, all further personnel who will
be in any position of authority and responsibility must be brought in
by invitation only; no one who volunteers to join must be accepted.

Second, all such persons who are invited must have had a close
relative who was murdered by the police (not merely "killed by an
officer in the line of duty", but murdered). This will severely
hinder such placement of CI's, but won't guarantee it, as some of
them would not blink at killing someone, even one of their own
relatives, to remove the thorn in their side I hope the foundation
will become.

Third, all such invitees will have to pass a rigorous background
investigation. I know that checking into public records will avail
little in this regard, as those criminals attempting to shut down the
foundation will have access to those records, so that any such check
will be merely pro forma, but it will be more difficult for
them to fake extensive interviews with a large number of persons who
are reputed to have known the prospect in their past.

Fourth, each invitee will have to undergo a detailed orientation
course to instill in them an awareness of the police espionage threat
the foundation will face once it begins to send notable public
figures to prison. This will include instructions on the necessity of
changing their lifestyle to eliminate anything which could give any
criminals invested with police powers a pretext for arrest, and the
leverage of prosecution as a tool to compel betrayal. As Sun Tzu
said, "A wise general places himself beyond the possibility of
defeat, and does not miss the opportunity to defeat the enemy." This
will mean they and their families will have to give up any bad
habits, such as drug usage, etc., that could be used to compromise
them. This will not prevent them from being framed, but it will
ensure that any such attempt will be bogus, and there will be things
they can do to minimize the chances of success of such an attempt.

Also, the foundation must be prepared to give full legal aid in such
a case, as this will help them to resist the extreme pressure to cut
a deal. The key to making the organization secure against such human
intelligence efforts is: no exceptions. Even the janitors who will
clean the part of the building used for all decision making and money
handling matters will have to meet these standards. I envision the
foundation will have four levels of membership: a general membership
open to anyone for contributors who will receive a newsletter or
magazine, etc.; a reserved membership for celebrities, etc., who will
support the cause; a operational level membership for persons
involved in the day-to-day running of the operational, but who will
have no access to reward funding, incoming tips, or decision-making
procedures, not even to access to those parts of the building; and
the controlling members who are carefully chosen and groomed to run
the organization.

There will then be a legally separate foundation overseas which will
be run along similar lines, which will actually handle the reward
funding involved, in such a way that the U.S. government can't get
its sticky, clammy fingers of the money or trace it to the person who
ratted out some crooked wardheeler or bent flatfoot. There are
numerous other questions to resolve in effecting this idea, but I
think you have the general idea.

I have drawn up a tentative reward scale with the amount based on the
size of the fish:

Once we're established, we can also, when it would be appropriate,
offer special rewards for information leading to the solving of
particular crimes, such as Waco, for instance, just to see what we
can shake loose. If the ATF agents there were willing to let other
agents walk into an "ambush" over a $200 tax matter, it would be
interesting to see what might happen if someone offered up, say, $10
million to encourage someone to rat out the others. If what I just
read in The Libertarian Enterprise's special May 1, 2000, issue about
the death of the FLIR expert is true, and someone is attempting to
silence those who could spill the beans, it might lead to some very
interesting disclosures by someone fearing they might be "sanitized"
over what they know. (In fact, this angle could be playing up very
effectively.) At very the least, the stress of having such a price on
their head might give them ulcers.

Of course, these rewards are only for a conviction on any old felony;
if there are "Special Circumstances", the rewards will go up
accordingly. If it involves a property forfeiture crime for which
their assets are seized, the rewards will double; if there's a
mandatory minimum sentence for which they will not have the
possibility of parole, the rewards will triple; if they receive a
life sentence without the possibility of parole, the rewards will
quintuple; and if they are executed, we'll pay out ten times as much.
This would mean paying out as much as a billion dollars for
information that sends a president to the gas chamber, but frankly, I
think it would be worth it.

Now, the problem of where to get this much money has probably
occurred to you, and to me as well, as I figure it will take perhaps
one to two billion dollars to do this right, but I think there are
some likely sources of funding available. First of all, to get the
initial seed money required, there are a large number of persons who
win multimillion dollars civil suits against government agencies
every year, many of them for serious civil rights violations for
which the criminally culpable perpetrators walk free. These persons
might be very willing to make substantial donations to an effort to
bring their victimizers to justice. Likewise, there are a number of
civil rights groups, and other organizations such as Rolling Thunder,
with large memberships who might be interested in supporting such a
cause. Then there are firms that have been screwed over by the
government in one way or another: I suspect the tobacco companies
alone might be willing to toss in a billion or two just for
sentimental reasons.

Nor need our fund raising efforts be limited to the United States
alone, either. There enough people overseas who have been bombed by
the U.S. recently that they might be eager to contribute to such a
noble cause, especially if their cousin Jamal was one of the ones
who, due to our Fearless Leader's chronic inability to tell the
difference between a postcard and a cruise missile when he wants to
"send a message", got a Tomahawk fired up his ass after he
"volunteered" for service in some raghead army to keep from getting
shot for draft dodging (you'd be amazed how much having a relative
blown to smithereens can piss some people off). Taking contributions
from overseas can even be presented in a very good light, as it gives
such victims a productive, positive, non-violent way to vent their
frustrations and effect political reform in America without resorting
to terrorism.

Also, adding an international dimension to the program has another
added benefit, as well. Most of the intelligence agencies of the
former eastern bloc countries, such as the former Soviet Union,
probably have files on most of our political leaders at least an inch
or two thick: the Just Rewards Foundation will give all those
starving former KGB agents a chance to turn those dusty old files
into cold, hard cash if they contain information on any indictable
offenses on the part of U.S. officials. Just imagine some of the
things the Chinese might have on the current administration!

I would be happy to hear your comments on this idea, and if you have
any ideas of your own, feel free to share them. While I don't have
any good idea at present as to who should be chosen to start such a
foundation, I feel it is something well worth looking into. The
powers that be are fond of setting up snitch programs to encourage
people to spy on each other and turn each other in for things no sane
or moral person would consider to be a crime, so it will be fitting
to turn the tables on them for a change. Setting up a system to feed
them into the maw of their own beast may prove to be one of the most
effective ways of forcing change in the system.

I have had a hunch for some time that the Republican Party has been
working to get rid of some of its traditional constituencies, that
are troublesome to the party by being ideological, or at least,
committed. This transcends the familiar "moderates versus right-wing"
battle made familiar by pundits. The true power-center of either
party recognizes that state power is the ultimate goal, and an end
unto itself.

Ideology, whether of left or right, is the only thing other than
economics that breeds challenges to state power, and economics can be
bought off or easily discredited as "greed," when necessary.
Established political parties tolerate ideological rhetoric to the
extent that it is necessary to keep self-important local
committee-people stuffing envelopes, but it must be kept in check if
the goals of the power-elite are to be obtained.

Certainly gun rights advocates are a constituency that has slowly
been eased toward the door. I had my first suspicion of that in 1989,
when Lee Atwater made his famous "We don't NEED to talk to gun owners
-- the election's over" statement. That suspicion was further
confirmed when the federal assault rifle ban passed by a hair -- and
then, when the Republicans gained a solid majority in the congress,
they somehow could not muster enough interest to repeal it -- or even
promise to and then fail, as they did with the rest of their
non-revolution.

Ideological rhetoric had run up against the reality of maintaining
the tools of power, and, surprise, surprise, power won. It was clear
that the anti-gun votes on the Republican side of the aisle had been
carefully choreographed to allow a gradual withdrawal from pro-gun
rhetoric, while still garnering gun owner votes, until the day came
when that constituency has either been completely marginalized by
propaganda, or shifted in its focus. Here in the year 2000 we find
the propaganda war making extraordinary strides, while much of the
pro-gun constituency is being neatly transferred from interest in
their rights, to interest in advancing the Republicans' long
established anti-civil-liberties agenda -- in the name of "getting
tough on crime."

There certainly are other constituencies -- without debating the
issue, per se, certainly the pro-life camp is one. Until power itself
is absolute, the striving for power cannot tolerate the existence of
any other absolutes, and absolutists become a greater threat as the
true goal of the power-elite is approached. They must be marginalized
and taken out of the political picture.

I think the past two weeks have shown a very neat demonstration of
the disposal of a minor and until now mostly ignored political
constituency -- the Cuban-American community. Certainly they have
that characteristic most troublesome to the power-elite -- solidarity
and singleness of purpose that is almost immune to penetration. This
has manifested itself as "disproportionate political power," we are
told by pundits, who find unacceptable any belief system that cannot
be shaken in less than ten minutes by Peter Jennings.

Please understand that this is not a debate of the issues of the
Elian affair, in any way. It is an observation that a constituency
that did exercise political influence via unswerving solidarity, has
curiously become an object of nationwide excoriation, with none of
their past political support coming to their public defense. Within
the past week a local vanity Op/Ed writer was motivated to write a
long column on "They come to this country you'd at least think
they would respect our Authority." I wondered first whether the
author considered that some of "They" may have been American citizens
longer than he had been alive; but next I wondered, why is this
fellow who is normally more concerned with moralizing over topless
bars and school boards suddenly motivated to compose an attack on the
Cuban-American community? Could it be that he is responding to the
Three-Minutes-Hate that has been subliminally issuing from our
mainstream media for over a week now?

The Cuban-Americans' "crime" was not just their intransigence on the
Elian issue. It was their intransigence in HAVING issues from which
they could not be deflected -- of making demands of congressmen and
other legislators, not forgetting when promises weren't kept and
goals weren't achieved, and not allowing themselves to be deflected
to alternative issues. The Elian issue offered an opportunity for the
power-elite of both political parties to put their propaganda
machines in gear to marginalize and hopefully eliminate from the
political scene a troublesome constituency they all wish they had
never inherited.

All ideological constituencies should watch and learn. You all will
get your turn.

While I cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the issues
raised by Jacob Hornberger in his recent postings (regarding the
LPUS, the Browne campaign, and certain individuals) are completely
true in every instance and in every detail, I can state the
following:

1. A number of the things he has said are, to my personal knowledge,
quite true. I had been prepared to bring some of it out on the C-SPAN
telecast of the "presidential debate" at the 1996 convention, but
decided to hold back. In reflective moments, I have at times
regretted that decision.

2. I think it is time, and past time, that these issues were brought
to light in a more effective way than has been attempted before. When
people have tried to get some of these issues discussed and resolved
in the past, they've been dismissed, ignored and/or suppressed, and
in some cases attacked personally and viciously. It's a pattern that
has gone on for too long, and it is an unhealthy emulation of the
very institutions that libertarians claim to abhor.

3. A number of additonal things Mr. Hornberger (or others) might have
said, have so far been left unsaid. In addition to that, according to
people with whom I have corresponded, Hornberger has
understated some of it. Whether that is because he feels he
has insufficient documentation of the evidence, I don't know.

4. A key point is that I can prove nothing he has said to be false --
and neither, apparently, can those who have been the objects of his
exercise. They have made no substantive reply to the specific issues,
but have instead resorted to their standard formulae of denial,
misdirection and casting aspersions on the messenger without really
addressing the message in an honest way.

What has been brought home to me most clearly over the past several
years, and what is most disheartening, is the fundamental dishonesty
which is accepted, condoned, and even directly participated in by
some people who hold themselves out as Libertarians, and even as
Libertarian "leaders."

The LPUS has shown us all that "Steiger's Law" holds true for them as
much as for anyone else. The structure has indeed become more
important than the mission (to those who run the structure).